Since I guess this might be the only news source covering this story – i’ll post it here – it’s certainly important to Ontarioians. The York Region and the Attorney General on behalf of the Ministry of Agric & Rural Affairs are trying to instill a blanket injunction on the production and distribution of any raw milk producer in Ontario. Michael Schmidt has been fighting this battle for 22 years. They seem determined to shut him, and any “John Doe” who are trying to provide raw milk to the people in that area, down. How terribly sad, government gone wrong. We are facing the same issue in America.

Oh, boy. With our dog Dingo and 3 cats we inherited and 3 chickens we have a few pets to take care of. Right now we are trying to figure out why Dingo is not feeling well. Changing his pet food and finding a better product which means organic with as few grains, by-products and fillers as possible. I want to start him on a raw diet -meat as duck chicken quail or lamb & some vegetables only, but uncooked as nature would have them eat. No deal for Mike – now if we raised some more chickens and needed to cull (not sick ones though!); this would be an excellent food source for dogs. But way expensive it seems, to feed unless we can figure out a source for raw food more cheaply than frozen Nature’s Logic or other good commercial brand. For now Natural Balance will have to do. Cats are being switched from Iams since babies 3 years ago; to more organic products. They are so picky though. It will be a gradual changeover. I don’t know if they’ll go raw. They do love their mice and sometimes only its back or head is left, so someones’ had a snack for sure. I Don’t let them snack on birds though. Fuzzy actually likes big birds, like the chickens Chickadee, Flippety and the Rooster, Jezabel who was supposed to be a hen. He learned yesterday not to stick his face so close to a chicken beak. boy he was upset when the Black Java did her thing and used the beak on his head. Fuzzy freaked and then stalked her, I certainly kept an eye on him in case he decided to get cat revenge.

11/13 : I’ll do a quick update on Dingo’s progress – he loves new raw diet and eats once every 24 hours. Yesterday with chicken he ate zucchini (baked till skin was soft) & kale blended very fine and mixed with kelp,wheat grass, slippery elm to help ease elimination and my own calcium blend; egg shells powdered 1 tsp per pound of food. Day before he ate beef, and then scallops with blended carrots & celery and my own wheatgrass & kelp. Burdock root and olive leaf are given as supplements every day – these aid with cleansing intestines & controlling any fungal problems he may have internally. Before, by just taking care of his external problems and not his inside, I couldn’t make progress. I just kept reintroducing the same type of commercial food back to him; just slowly realizing that this was what was making him sick in first place. Listening to people say “change his food to this, to that, to the other” and nothing making much difference. His skin still deteriorated and got slowly worse. Topical applications appeared to help but i believe the problem was still manifesting INside his body, and spreading where we couldn’t see, but was seriously degrading his health. His eyes already seem to be losing their white opaqueness that almost made him seem blind at times. He seems to be having a will to live again, though basically he rests and heals most of the time now. So, he will endure while I attempt to clean up and detox my own body. Kind of funny as I let go of meat, he embraces it ! I will keep my eyes open for a good source of food, right now the meat he is eating is still probably GE grain fed meat (which is why I don’t eat it) so it is not ideal. But better than commercial stuff for now. So, I am learning what to look for and will hopefully come up with local sources of gmo free meat for Mike & i, the dog, cats and GE free food for the chickens to complement their free range diet. This all makes me want to study the Nutritionist and Holistic Pet courses to complement the Master Herbalist class. Then might as well go the whole way and become a Naturopath; maybe one day…